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Shaping Calgary: Innovation, growth in home building followed lean 1980s

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calgaryherald

Publishing date:

July 4, 2014 • 6 minute read

Jayman MasterBuilt co-founder Jay Westman outside one of the company's most popular models in the early 80s in the community of McKenzie, a five-level split called the Silver View. Wil Andruschak for the HeraldWil Andruschak/ Wil Andruschak

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It was a time when Michael Jackson’s Thriller topped the charts and moviegoers flocked to the theatre to watch E.T. phone home. In the 1980s, it was hip to be seen in Members Only jackets, leg-warmers — even neon sunglasses. It was a bold decade. And the country’s political scene was no exception.

In 1981, Calgary construction sites buzzed as 15,172 homes broke ground around the city, according to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. But things spiralled downward after Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau rolled out the National Energy Program. The controversial policy took its toll on the country’s oil sector, which had a ripple effect on industries across Alberta — including the housing business.

“It was a tough era, frankly,” says Bob Clark, now senior vice-president of business development for Brookfield Residential.

“Interest rates were up over 20 per cent.” And with the number of people that left Alberta after the National Energy Program “the 1980s were characterized by just trying to stay in business,” he adds.

Jay Westman, the chairman and CEO of Jayman MasterBuilt, agrees.

“Virtually every builder at that time went down,” says Westman, who co-founded the award-winning company with his late father Al. He adds only a few homebuilding companies survived the economic downturn. “There were thousands of foreclosures across Edmonton and Calgary,” says Westman.

In 1982, construction starts on homes of all kinds dropped to 9,599. Activity continued to slow down in 1983, when shovels turned in 4,882 homes before drying up in 1984 with just 1,803 starts.

“A furnace in a house in 1983 was $5,000. In 1984-85, that same furnace, I remember it breaking below $1,000 to put into a house,” says Westman.

The decade later saw businesses turn to innovation. Not only did that mean a different approach to build forms, but business strategies.

“We were the first company that came out with the pre-sale concept and we understood how we could take somebody’s five per cent down,” says Westman.

“We were able to sell new homes cheaper than all the resale homes that were on the market.”

The company’s first show homes were in Woodbine in southwest Calgary, but the community of McKenzie was where Jayman really took its first step into large volume builds.

“I think we started off at $79,900 with no garage,” recalls Westman. These homes had a lane and were a split bi-level measuring about 1,100 square feet.

“We had a very custom finish in it,” Westman says. In fact, custom was the word of the day. “We started right off the get-go, doing custom spindles and custom moulding on the cabinetry,” adds Westman. Homes would also boast energy-efficient furnaces and two-by-six walls with R20 insulation.

“So we continued to innovate – mostly, we innovated in design but we also innovated in product mix,” adds Westman.

He says it was important for the new home sector to compete with the resale market, which at the time, had most of the inventory for Westman recalls that a complete brass fixture package was, “cutting edge at the time.”

“In those days, we’d sign the agreement and have them in the house in 90 days. Right or wrong, we thought the world had come to an end when we actually thought it would take four months to build a house,” adds Westman.

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In land development, the 1980s weren’t a time for large-scale communities. Developers opted instead for niche markets.

“We were developing very small parcels of land throughout the ’80s,” says Clark. “We really didn’t start (many) new communities. We were carrying on with a lot of communities that were underway.”

It wasn’t until the end of the 1980s that developers turned to larger, master-planned developments, says Clark. At last, building crews were busy again. New construction of both single-family homes and multi-family developments were on the way up. In 1989, shovels turned in 6,228 homes, says CMHC.

That marked the first time more than 6,000 homes were under construction since 1982.

From 1989 to 1990, construction activity climbed 12 per cent with 7,004 homes in the ground.

The high point for new construction in the new decade was 1998, when there were 12,495 starts — up 100 per cent from the same time a decade earlier.

“The 90s came back pretty well,” says Cal Wenzel of Shane Homes. “It was a reasonable rate of growth. We didn’t have that much inventory so you had a reasonable time and potential for growing. Because (there wasn’t) excess inventory but always sufficient inventory, the pricing held.”

But the mid-2000s is when housing starts in the Calgary area truly reached new heights.

Fuelled by a humming economy in Alberta, 2006 saw a record 17,046 construction starts of homes of all kinds.

“When you look at job creation numbers, it’s up 46,400 so they are even stronger than we anticipated,” CMHC senior market analyst Lai Sing Louie said in a Herald story in 2006.

“To put that in perspective, 46,400 net new jobs created is like bringing in Lethbridge and a lot of Canmore and sticking it onto Calgary in one year.”

In the late 1980s, Brookfield, formely Carma, brought communities such as southeast Calgary’s McKenzie Lake into its stable, which had been developed by the Bank of Nova Scotia.

In 1989, (Brookfield) bought the lake and surrounding land. “We started thinking about how we would develop some of those lands,” says Clark, adding this was the genesis of McKenzie Towne. This is an ammenity-rich community with a wide range of housing now selling in its final stages.

“We settled on the neo-traditional style of community for McKenzie Towne,” says Clark.

“We resurrected the idea of grid streets and separate sidewalks. We brought that on in 1995.”

Defining communities through urban design played a larger role.

“It wasn’t that we didn’t do this in the past, we just started looking at it with little bit more rigour,” says Clark. He says trees were of a specific variety and developers looked at how landscaping worked with the overall look of the community.

“We started looking at the design palette we were dealing with, the street lights that we were putting into these communities and looking at more of the landscaping elements and the hard landscape elements to keep a rigour to the palette of the community.”

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Clark says trends in architecture during the 1980s remained relatively eclectic.

“I think we attempted to introduce a little bit more brick and stucco in the 1980s,” says Clark.

He adds, the move to stucco was likely imported from the Arizona area.

Builders also found inspiration in other parts of the western U.S., including the now popular open-concept orientation.

The move to a plan with fewer walls started in the late 1990s, says Wenzel.And it’s now common to see a great room, kitchen and dining area in a shared space.

“Like a lot of us that have been in the game for a long time, we used to go to California a lot to look at houses,” says Wenzel. “When California was in its heyday, they had some fabulous looking stuff.

“One of the things we’d notice as you’d walk in — you could look from the front foyer all the way to the backyard.”

The idea was soon brought to the Calgary market, where the concept was what Wenzel calls, a natural transformation.

“As land became more expensive and development became more expensive, you got into a narrow lot. “When you’re dealing on a relatively narrow lot, if you throw in a bunch of walls, you narrow it down,” he adds. “So by leaving it open, it gives you a much more open feel.”

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